Man Serving Life Sentence For Murder Admits To 2 Cold-Case Homicides In DC Area

FAIRFAX, VA — Fairfax County Police announced an indictment against 52-year-old Charles Helem for the 1987 homicide of Eige Sober Adler of Kensington, Maryland. Helem is currently serving a life sentence for first degree murder.

FCPD Chief Kevin Davis and Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano announced the indictment Wednesday afternoon during a press conference at the county's public safety headquarters. They were joined by Prince George’s County Police Chief Malik Aziz and State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County Aisha Braveboy.

Sober-Adler's body was found on Sept. 9, 1987, in a rear parking lot of the Dulles Days Inn on Centreville Road in Herndon, according to her profile on FCPD's Cold Case website. Her vehicle was later recovered about a half-mile away by police on the Dulles Access Road.

"Thirty-five years later, we stand before the community to say we have an indictment," said Major Ed O'Carroll of FCPD's Major Crime's Unit.

Helem's name had come up previously during FCPD's investigation into Sober Adler's death.

"Helem was talked to that very night and that very morning," O'Carroll said. "He had been a person of interest."

Even though Sober Adler's homicide from 1987 was classified as a cold case, he said that it still was an active investigation.

Helem is currently serving a life sentence in Virginia. He was convicted of murdering 37-year-old Patricia Bentley in her Chantilly townhouse on April 6, 2002.

In addition to confessing to Sober Adler's homicide, Helem admitted to killing 19-year-old Jennifer Landry of Brockton, Massachusetts in August 2002. He told police that he'd picked up Landry in Washington, D.C. Her body was later found in Mount Rainer in Prince George's County, Maryland.

In 2017 and 2020, Helem had written letters to the Prince George's County Police saying that he had information about the Landry case, but he refused to talk to detectives, according to Chief Aziz. Detectives persisted and Helem confessed to killing Landry and mentioned another unsolved homicide in Fairfax County. That information led to Wednesday's indictment in the Sober Adler case.

Last week, a detective from the Cold Case Unit of the Prince George's County Police Department obtained an arrest warrant for Helem in connection with the Landry homicide.

Helem told Fairfax investigators that he was driving a truck and that's how he had met Landry.

"That's where he preyed upon his women that he would he would meet and that's where he met her and that's the reason that we contacted the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit to help them check across the country to see if anything that met his M.O.," Aziz said.

Davis told reporters that police were actively investigating the possibility that Helem may be linked to other cold cases in the region.